We recently posted a piece with the snappy title The Diversity Project (chair: Helena Morrissey) commissions a study (leader: Professor Alex Edmans) to assess the investment impact of diversity of thought and have since researched the online output of Professor Edmans, an economist who is professor of finance at London Business School and Mercers’ School Memorial Emeritus Professor of Business at Gresham College. If you take nothing else from this blog piece, it should be my recommendation that you catch a fascinating podcast interview, Is DEI built on dodgy data? (October 2024, 58 minutes).

The biography on his website is here (is it just me, or are professors looking very young these days, like policemen?). The Policy and Practice page is here, with links to some of his articles including Is There Really A Business Case For Diversity? (Medium, 2021) and No, boardroom diversity does not mean higher profits (Telegraph, 2021) and Is diversity actually good for business? (Spectator, 2024).

Edmans is the author of May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics and Studies Exploit Our Biases – And What We Can Do About It. The hardback edition (£14.99) and Kindle edition (£9.99) were published last April, the paperback edition (£10.99) will be published next April.

There are plenty of video and audio files on YouTube of Edmans, here. They include Do Diverse Companies Really Perform Better? (Sacred Cows, 2024) and May Contain Lies (Stanford Graduate School of Business, 2024).